The Idler, Wednesday, June 1

Injury time but a win

IT'S NOT OFTEN that a jammed thermostat and a boiling radiator can count as a positive experience. Yet the other day it did as I took a friend out to King Shaka to board a connecting flight to London.

The Berea Bomber flew up the freeway like a bird. Then, just 500m from the terminal, clouds of steam issued from under the bonnet; the temperature gauge was suddenly in critical red. With great presence of mind, I mounted the nearest traffic island and opened the bonnet to take a look. It was like Dante's Inferno in there.

My pal had a plane to catch. We gathered the luggage to leg it. But then a police car did a U-turn and offered him a lift to the terminal. I was just gingerly removing the radiator cap when the coppers were back. They gave me a large plastic bottle and pointed to some sprinklers on the lawn. They couldn't stay and help, they said, they'd been called somewhere. But it was nice of them.

I'd just topped up the water when a small white car pulled up and a chap jumped out with a bottle of water. He'd spotted my predicament as he drove past and gone to fetch water for me. This was astonishing.

I phoned a backyard mechanic of my acquaintance to ask his advice, and he wanted to drive out to help. On no account, I said, the AA were already on their way. Then a former colleague phoned out of the blue and, when he heard what had happened, he too wanted to come out. He kept phoning for progress reports. My friend I'd dropped off kept phoning from the airport in Johannesburg.

The AA fellow was cheery and efficient. We put the Berea Bomber on the flatbed and drove back to Durban in style. Later that evening I got a phone call from a gruff mechanic. He'd found the problem. A guy was working on my car at 9.30 at night?

One shouldn't need to mention these things, but my benefactors of the afternoon represented a pretty complete range of the racial/ethnic/linguistic categories of this part of the world. Where it counts, things are hanging together.

Oh, and that evening a delightful blonde insisted on buying me a bunnychow. Does it get better than this?

What a day! A massive setback then all kinds of plusses. It might have been in injury time, but I say I won.

Welfare skyvers

BRITISH Prime Minister David Cameron is up against it. He's trying to reverse a culture of welfare dependency that has been with them for more than 60 years. One of the difficulties is to separate those who really need welfare grants from the skyvers – households that really do have an income but claim they don't.

Here are some of the more ridiculous excuses offered by people caught out cheating on welfare:

·         "We don't live together, he just comes each morning to fill up his flask".

·         "I wasn't using the ladders to clean windows, I carried them for therapy for my bad back."

·         "I had no idea my wife was working. I never noticed her leaving the house twice a day in a fluorescent jacket and with a Stop Children sign."

·         "My wallet was stolen so someone must have been using my identity, I haven't been working".

·         "I didn't know I was still on benefit."

·         "I didn't declare my savings because I didn't save them, they were given to me."

·         "He lives in a caravan in the drive, we're not together."

·         "He does come here every night and leave in the morning and although he has no other address I don't regard him as living here."

·         "It wasn't me working, it was my identical twin.

·         "I wasn't aware my wife was working because her hours of work coincided with the times I spent in the garden shed."

 

 

Tailpiece

Paddy shouts frantically into the phone: "My wife is in labour and her contractions are only two minutes apart!"

Doctor: "Is this her first child?"

Paddy: "No! Dis is her husband!"

Last word

Well, if crime fighters fight crime and fire fighters fight fire, what do freedom fighters fight? They never mention that part to us, do they?

George Carlin

GRAHAM LINSCOTT